The Newest Garden

Well, one more garden story to go. Like most city dwellers, we have a sidewalk, and thus land between it and the street. Note I say land, not grass. We kinda started out with grass, but that didn't last. It wasn't too awful until the city redid our street, including the curb. All that land got torn up. The city said they'd put in dirt and grass, and I suppose technically they did, but you've never seen stuff of poorer quality. I think the dirt on the sod was about 1/4 inch deep. Needless to say, even with watering, it didn't last. The weeds moved in in a big hurry. We overseeded - not much difference. We pulled up all the lousy sod and seeded. Worked for a while, then died. We began to despair - it all looked so awful, particularly next to our new wall! (Plant at left is Dotted Blazing Star)

We started kicking around the idea of a boulevard garden last summer, as we've seen quite a few around here in the last several years. But we didn't want anything that would require a lot of work. I'm not sure who, but one of us suggested native plants, as they're uniquely adapted to this climate and, once established, don't require nearly as much care as other perennials. So we had our soil tested, to make sure road salt wasn't the issue. To our surprise, the dirt barely registered salt at all! It came out as pretty normal stuff. We talked to a consultant at Out Back Nursery, a business specializing in native plants. He suggested we use RoundUp to kill everything on the boulevard, since it doesn't stay in the soil more than a few days. Then we mowed the dead stuff really short and dug a trench around the edges. This would allow our mulch to fill in the trench without overflowing onto the sidewalk. So we did all that.



Then we planted. In the rain. Yeah. But it was the start of a several day rainfall that gave the plants a great start. We covered them all for the winter and waited. This spring we got in more stuff from Prairie Moon, another native plant nursery. Almost all of it came up (Prairie Moon's stuff came bare root, so pretty much nothing above ground at planting time). I added one more group of plants from the Friends School Plant Sale. Planting sure was easier this spring - the grass had done a lot of decaying under the mulch during the winter!



It's coming along pretty well, as you can see below. Those empty parts aren't really empty - we planned a path that meanders through the gardens. Not much is blooming this year, but I don't think that's unusual. Perennials usually take a year or so to get their roots going, and then the big growth happens and the blooms, too. It's not quite all native stuff. I added some tough plants from our other gardens - flax, blanket flower, hostas and daylilies. They're blooming quite well. Seems like if you dig up a plant and plop it right back in the ground, it hardly knows it's been moved! We shouldn't need the hoses after this year, as the plants should be well enough established to take anything but the most extreme drought. I think in a few years, it will look really good.